BENGALURU: With increased adoption of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, companies are now taking advantage of such emerging technologies to drive growth. Dell Technologies is expecting to see a significant impact of these technologies. "The utilization of AI and ML is becoming more widespread as companies seek to take advantage of the benefits these technologies offer. We have been exploring this field and currently have multiple projects, products focused on using AI to improve our business," Ramesh Jampula, VP, IT, India and APJC Regional CIO, Dell Technologies, told this newspaper. Talking about emerging tech such as IoT, multi-cloud, Jampula said businesses have varying needs that influence their IT strategies, but they all share common goals of reducing costs, increasing flexibility and creating new value.

BENGALURU: Of late, organisations have been showing great interest in IT security, as ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation, study shows 91% of respondents agree that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will play a significant role in strengthening their organisation's IT security framework in the near future. The company has been receiving many enquiries about cyber security, said Shailesh Davey, Co-Founder and Vice President of Engineering at Zoho. IT at Work: 2022 and Beyond study surveyed 3,300 decision-makers across IT and other key business functions in organisations across 18 countries, including India. According to the study, 98% of all business decision-makers have invested in AI and ML and are doing so for more than one use case on average. Automation is the most common use case with 64%, followed by cyberattack prevention at 59%. Of the surveyed ITDMs (IT decision-makers), 85% agree that organisations' existing security landscapes need to change to ensure protection against cyberattacks.

BOSTON: Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered bots will become the next interface, shaping our interactions with the applications and devices we rely on and Microsoft's latest solutions are set to change the way HP interacts with its customers and partners, Indian-born Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. "Bots are now learning in human context and the relevant thing for us is to make them intelligent as we learn from customers' experience. Our solutions are going to give HP a 360-degree view of its customer services," Nadella announced at HP's Global Partner Conference (GPC) 2016 at the Boston Conference and Exhibition Centre (BCEC) here. HP announced a six-year agreement to deploy Microsoft Dynamics customer relation management (CRM) online in order to enhance collaboration across marketing, sales and service operations. With Dynamics, as well as Azure, Office 365 and other Microsoft Cloud solutions, HP has invested in the sales and service collaboration platform to deliver a seamless sales experience for customers and partners.

BENGALURU: Customer engagement plays an important part in traditional retail outlets which seems to be missing among the plethora of e-commerce portals. To resolve this, a bunch of young entrepreneurs have come up with an Artificial Intelligence-driven sales chatbot which engages customers with a human touch. And the good news is that it's live and will provide round-the-clock hands-on solutions and technical support. Navneet Gupta, Chief Technical Officer of Racetrack.ai We understand that customer engagement is of utmost priority for any business and we have designed it to not only intelligently engage with the customer but also make the conversations fruitful with every chat." He points out that the AI-driven platform can not only convert a simple query to a customer but can also attain a loyal customer for life by a unique customer engagement."

The defining advance of the next decade, if you listen to the prophets of Silicon Valley, will be the seismic and unavoidable ascent of artificial intelligence. It might be hard to take the thought seriously when a satnav sends you down a dead-end country road, or your phone's autocorrect feature turns a carefully-constructed text message to gibberish, but the milestones reached in the past year alone have been exceptional. DeepMind, the British AI company owned by Google, has defeated the world champion at Go, the ancient game that requires a finely tuned sense of intuition to master. Driverless cars now seem like an inevitability rather than a curiosity. Error rates on image recognition technology have dropped from 25pc in 2011 to less than 4pc.

HYDERABAD: At a time when most of the startups are focusing on solving fairly shallow problems, Avishkar, the start-up accelerator programme of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) on Friday took three companies under its wings to encourage entrepreneurs who are into solving deep-tech problems. Screened from about 140 applications across the world, the top three companies are all set to form the first batch of the six-month long programme. The selected startups will now work closely with the Avishkar team and the faculty members of IIIT-H labs and other partners over the next six months to get to a level of investment-readiness that will launch them to the next stage of their journey. "We are a four-month-old company trying to build a virtual personal stylist for women. Through our app, we want to offer all the services that a stylist offers to women. In other words, we want to create artificial intelligence (AI) of a personal stylist. The best part about Avishkar is that unlike many accelerators, the programmes here are personalised for each and every startup and would be helpful for us to grow faster," Komal Prajapati, founder, Fabulyst, said.

HYDERABAD: After being ranked among the best universities in the country, the University of Hyderabad (UoH) here on Wednesday was placed among the most productive organisations involved in artificial intelligence research in India by a UK-based journal. According to the study published in Science & Technology Libraries Journal, United Kingdom, UoH has been ranked 7th among 160 organisations, as most-productive organisation involved in artificial intelligence research in India. The top 20 most productive organisations involved in artificial intelligence research in India published 53 or more papers each and contributed 2,219 papers. The average citation per paper achieved by the total papers of these 20 organisations was 4.68, and eight organisations achieved a higher average citation per paper ratio than the group average. The institutions listed include Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras (10.21);

CHENNAI: Infosys has launched a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool that the IT major claims will revolutionize the way companies manage complex information technology systems. 'Mana', the AI tool, can optimize mundane maintenance of IT systems, saving substantial operating expenditure for firms and freeing up human resources to innovate. CEO Vishal Sikka, who has been at the announced the system at the firm's Confluence conference in San Francisco. "If we can bring automation to do better things we can already do, then we can focus on innovation," he said, adding that Infosys has been doing that by using Mana in maintenance and operation of the complex systems, thereby freeing up resources to "reinventing the landscape" in which they operate. Systems like these, said Sikka in the buildup to the announcement, will maintain and operate a complex landscape, codify and capture knowledge that sits in business processes, helping turn focus on improving processes and implementing "Zero Distance" between end user and the firm.

BENGALURU: Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Infosys, on Monday announced that it will provide a corpus grant worth 24 crore over the next three years to the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi to establish the Infosys Centre for Artificial Intelligence on its Okhla campus. The centre will initially be headed by Srikanth Saripalli, an expert in robotics and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), currently spending his sabbatical at IIIT-Delhi. The centre will facilitate work on both fundamental and applied aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) and focus on areas such as robotics, machine learning, computer vision, AI for software systems, large-scale data analytics, among others. Several faculty members of IIIT-Delhi will be associated with the centre, and research will be conducted by PhD scholars, post-docs, students, and visiting researchers. The centre will start a specialised MTech course.

KOCHI: Saarang Sumesh made robots on his own long before he started going to school. The seven-year-old Class II student of Choice School, Tripunithura, is the youngest maker of robots in the state and, probably, the youngest in the country as well. The Palluruthy native, son of Sumesh V S and Srijaya, started building complex machines like internal combustion engine models from the age of three. By four, he began building the LEGO NxT robot models and started making his own robot models - walking stick for the visually challenged, house-cleaning robot, robotic hand, tricycle, humanoid robot - by the time he turned five. Now, he learns and makes new Arduino projects using micro-control kit (electronic kit) and Raspberry Pi. ''When I got the Lego robotic kit I was thrilled to make robots out of it.